


freefall (flying)

by tantamoq



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-02
Updated: 2013-06-02
Packaged: 2017-12-13 15:40:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/825954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tantamoq/pseuds/tantamoq
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirk is used to falling - what he isn't prepared for is the moment when he might actually hit the ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	freefall (flying)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by but totally not filling a prompt on the kinkmeme (http://strek-id-kink.livejournal.com/1695.html?thread=364703#t364703). Special thanks to Julia (myownremedy) for betaing, you're an absolute peach.
> 
> \---
> 
> "There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground, and miss." - from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Sulu is monitoring Kirk's frequencies already before he even gets the helmet on - the set up is one he slips into with, if not a familiar ease, exactly, then something close. There isn't ease at times like this, of course, not in the traditional sense, but they're both used to breathing something that feels more like pure adrenaline rather than oxygen, so it feels okay. It's familiar enough, anyway - this isn't the first time they've done something like this, although the space debris and the potential mass murderer they've been forced to side with are new.

 

In fact, Kirk is so used to falling with Sulu that it almost feels like flying. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't at least a little bit scared, but mostly what he's worried about is Sulu blaming himself if something goes wrong, when it's almost never his fault. Sulu tells him to double check the locking mechanisms on his helmet, so he does, and he almost doesn't sound worried. Kirk wants to tell him it's okay, they've done this a million times, he'll be fine as long as Sulu's got him, he'll be fine, but Khan is there like a jam in the cogs of this well oiled machine they've built together, and there's just seconds to launch anyway. Kirk is wishing it were Sulu with him, not Khan, but he hardly has time to dwell on it before he's gone, and the hatch is open, and space is rushing towards him from every side, seeming at once too big and too small. 

 

It doesn't matter that things are different now, that he's rushing through open space with an enemy at his side instead of a friend, and that he's actually meant to be falling this time - his first thought when he first makes a jump will always be about the first one he made, following Sulu off the edge of a Romulan drill. They've done it dozens of times since then, some blend of immersion therapy and, (judging from what tends to happen when they're safely back on their feet again) incredibly high stakes foreplay, but there's some part of it that never changes. The air in his lungs pressing against his bones with the pressure of space rushing past tastes like the fear of death, but not for himself, for Sulu, and it makes him cold and focused and fearless and lucid in a way that makes all sounds that aren't Sulu's voice fade into silence, and all options of failure disappear. 

 

This time, he has a monitor in front of his face, a guide line before his eyes, and a guiding voice in his ears, and it feels like, in spite of all of the literal obstacles before him, there's no way he won't make it. After all, the first time they ever did this, anything like this, it wasn't a part of the plan at all - the danger was supposed to be coming from the Romulans guarding the drill they'd been sent to shut down, not from the surface of Vulcan, hot and hard and hundreds of metres beneath where they were ever meant to have gone, flying up towards them faster than even the speed of their heart rates could go. The whole mission was like a case study in Murphy's law - first they lost the charges, then they lost the window of deactivation, and Sulu's chute, and then Sulu himself, but Jim Kirk was that incredible kind of brave that most people would call reckless, and there was one thing he wasn't going to lose, not if he could help it, so he'd followed him. 

 

He can't help but think about it now, about the moment when they made impact, slamming together, objects in space, the moment just before his chute had snapped, when he'd felt like they'd just lost a war but won the most important battle, and about the moment just after, when he almost stopped breathing because he hadn't even considered that there was a chance they might not make it until it seemed like there was no other option. That hadn't lasted long either - he didn't believe in no win scenarios, and for all that their fall ended in a failed mission and the transporter floor slamming into them so hard it took him a few seconds to realize he hadn't actually died, he still wouldn't call it a defeat. There was no such thing as defeat with your heart beating that hard for that many reasons. 

 

Most people would have probably kept away from heights after that, letting other crewmembers take the mountain climbs and the long range jumps and the freefalls through open space, but neither of them were most people, so they had made a habit of it. Between missions, between assignments, on days off, or on duty when the opportunity arose, they'd go flying (falling) together. Sometimes, they'd go cliff diving; sometimes, it was like this, in open space, playing without gravity; and sometimes, they'd take a small shuttle, just the two of them, to somewhere remote, and recreate the day they'd almost died in each other's arms, variations on a melody neither of them would ever get out of their head. There were jumps where they went together, jumps where one of them was in the ship (like Sulu was now, monitoring his frequencies, knowing them all by heart so he'd notice even the slightest slip up), jumps where they spotted each other physically, and jumps where the only comfort Kirk had was Sulu's voice in his ear, telling him to angle himself a little, watch out for that thing they both knew he could see on his viewscreen just as well as Sulu could, and the comfort that when he had his feet back on something solid, he'd have more than just that voice to hold on to. (And if there was a part of him that sometimes thought about how if something did go wrong, if he never made it back, that he could have the comfort of that voice being the last thing he heard, well… Jim Kirk didn't believe in no-win scenarios, right? If there was that part of him, it might have been stirring then, as he went hurtling through space towards an enemy ship with an enemy companion, and as his viewscreen cracked before his eyes, yeah, but even if it was, he didn't have time for it.)

 

He had to fight the instinct to just close his eyes when the guide went out completely, to just close his eyes and feel his way through, to try and be as accepting of his own death as Spock had been when they almost hadn't pulled him out of that damned volcano, to just focus on Sulu's voice and try not to focus on the terror creeping in on both of them, but then that was gone too, for a flickering second, and he knew he knew that his chance might have just dropped to a single digit percentage, but he couldn't let it go. He wasn't half so afraid of dying as he was of not getting to say goodbye, or of failing another mission in freefall, and this both was and wasn't like the last handful of times he'd been rocketing through space like he was now, and he both was and wasn't terrified. He knew if Bones were there, he'd be having a breakdown about the crystalline fissures in his helmet, and okay, if Kirk thinks about the reality of that too much, he might start panicking a little too, so he just thinks about the way Bones' eyebrows would probably look like they were about to shoot off his face if he was the one thinking about it instead, and it helps a little. He dodges a bit of debris, and wonders with an odd, detached sort of something almost like serenity how the hell he's going to make it without his viewscreen, and that's when he hears Khan. 

 

They get to the door narrowly, and the door opens, narrowly, and Scotty doesn't fly off into space after them, narrowly, and everything Kirk seems to do ends narrowly, but at least he's there to see it through. He spares half a second to imagine the expression on Sulu's face after he's safely through the door, and another half a second to smile reflectively, and then it's the mission, and he doesn't have time for anything else. It's funny, he's so used to falling with Sulu that his body almost seems confused that they haven't reunited yet, and he has to actively push the thoughts he's having out of his mind to keep them from distracting him completely. They'll make it, he thinks, they'll make it and they'll win this, and afterwards, he can carry whatever leftover adrenaline he has back to his pilot, and they'll celebrate another landing, another day. He doesn't count on everything that comes next.

 

\---

 

The jump is easy - they've done this before, and while the stakes are higher, Sulu finds relief in the familiarity of the operation. He's never guided Jim through this kind of debris, or to this kind of target, or with this kind of necessity riding on his back, but he's guided him before, and been guided by him in return, and he knows how it feels. Still, he worries, and he knows Jim would roll his eyes and tell him that whatever happens, he never does anything less than twice his best, so it'd be his fault, not Sulu's, _don't blame yourself for the trouble I get myself into_ , or something like that, but he can't help it. He knows Jim knows what he's doing, and he believes in him, and he knows he's scared too but he'd never admit it, least of all to himself; he knows that Jim understands that each gentle instruction he gives him has a few dozen layers of other things they don't really ever need to say woven into it, so he keeps talking him through it, and tries not to think about the wildcard in the deck on the other end of their comm line. Even when he loses Khan's signal, he tries not to think about it, tries to focus on Jim, on keeping him flying. Even when he loses the display completely, he tries not to think about it. They've done this before: they both know how to fly together.

 

It feels off, when Khan takes over, like an itch in the back of his uniform he can't even place let alone reach, but it gets the job done, and they make it. Of course they make it. Jim Kirk is a good luck charm with eyes like stars, and he always makes it. Sulu lets himself smile a little bit, and then he's back to duty, back to a clear mind and steady hands and waiting for the next thing to happen. Things don't go smoothly, but they go forward, and he's starting to think that maybe he's been around him long enough to have kissed a bit of philosophy off of Kirk's lips, or something like that: even when things get their most dire, he doesn't even see the option of failure. They'll make it. Narrowly, yes, but they'll make it. They always do. 

 

As it turns out, even always has its limitations. 

 

The ship is in freefall, and her core isn't firing right, isn't keeping her going, and Sulu, well, he can sympathize. 

 

\---

 

Kirk is stumbling through the catacomb-like centre of his ship, his falling, failing ship, and he knows that Sulu, that everyone, is doing all they can to save her, but he knows he's the only one who can, and it hurts like only knowing bitter truths can hurt. In retrospect, they should have anticipated Khan's turnabout, should have kept a closer eye on him, and damn it, there should be better ways than this to fix a damaged warp core, but it's too late for any of that, and he doesn't want to spend the last minutes of his life, however many he has, dwelling on what-ifs and should-haves. Instead, he thinks about falling (flying). In his head, he's on the deck of a short range shuttlecraft, hovering a few hundred metres over a pristine stretch of ocean, and Sulu is next to him, and they've double-checked their chutes, and his heart is already headed for double-time in his chest, and everything is going to be okay. In his head, he's tumbling through space, Sulu doing his best imitation of a tour guide in his ear, announcing the names of the planets and moons he can see lightyears away, ("And on your right, deep space, and to your left, coming as a complete surprise, more space - this stuff is everywhere, Captain, it's almost like we're completely in it or something."), and he's got the comfort of that and of the cable he's on that he knows is about to pull him back into the ship they took to get out there. In his head, he's flying, not tripping over himself and struggling through a place he never should have been in the first place, and it reminds him too much of the first fall, of the moment after the chute broke, and plummeting towards the certainty of death, only this time it won't be quick, and Chekov can't just beam him out, and it's all or nothing: he might win the war, has to, but this battle is doomed. He's doomed. He reaches the warp core, and imagines it as what it is: the thing that's going to kill him, the thing that's going to make it so he won't get to say goodbye, and he kicks the shit out of it, to make sure it's the captain who goes down, not the ship, not the crew (not the pilot). 

 

He makes it back to the door, and slumps down; his vision is blurring now, his skin feels loose, and his eyes are weak, as are his lungs, his legs, and everything else, but he can still tell that there's people missing. He doesn't see Chekov, or Sulu, or Spock, and he can't barely speak, and this doesn't taste like victory. The ship whispers comforts in the sounds of her warp core whirring with regularity, and the chamber informing him that the decontamination process is going smoothly, but it doesn't really help. He's scared, like the ground is gone from underneath him, not like real falling, not the way he does it, where he knows there's a ground to hit, for better or for worse, but like you fall in a dream, on and on and nothing and blackness and fear, and he's not ready for this. He wants to be anywhere else, but he doesn't even have the strength to imagine it now.

 

His entire life was a freefall, all adrenaline and open mouthed kisses and chances he was born to take, but he never realized until then how much it would hurt when he finally hit the ground. It takes all his strength to raise his hand and press it to the glass, and more still to move his fingers. At least he got one goodbye. At least the rest of them are going to make it now. His vision goes, and he strains to replace the blindness with everything he wanted to see again, but won't get to, and everything feels too big, too loud, like the ground rushing up to meet him, only this time, he's alone.

 

\---

 

Sulu's sitting in a corridor in the Academy's sick bay, running flight patterns and algorithms and germination cycles in his head to keep himself occupied. He knows Kirk is going to be fine, trusts Dr. McCoy and the other medical officers attending to him to do their jobs, and harebrained as it sounds, he believes in the blood transfusion. More than any of that, though, he believes in Jim Kirk, and his unyielding stubbornness. So, yeah, he's not exactly worried, per se, but it's been a week now, and maybe apprehensive is the word for what he's feeling: apprehensive that too much of Khan will wake up with Kirk when he finally does, or apprehensive that it might take longer than they expected, or maybe apprehensive that some day he might have to stand vigil in a morgue instead of a hospital. Sulu didn't see Jim die, but he did see him dead, and it's something he doesn't want to see again. For the first time since that first fall, when he was sure that it was the end, and then they were together and he knew it wasn't, for the first time, he realizes that his captain isn't invincible. It always seemed like death was something that happened to other people, not to them. They lost men sometimes, sure, sometimes even people Sulu knew, sometimes right in front of him, hell, he'd watched Olson go straight into an incinerator on the day of their descent to Vulcan, but Jim and his closest companions? They were untouchable. Only now, they weren't. If Kirk could die, regardless of whether he came back afterwards, then maybe any one of them could. If Kirk could die, then the Enterprise could warp into a conflict that she couldn't make it out of. Anything could happen. Anything could go wrong. Sulu just wants him to wake up already. It's been a week.

 

He wonders if there's anything he could have done. He knows the captain would object (loudly, verbosely, and probably with a bit of physicality, if prompted) to him blaming himself for any part of the mess they'd all wound up in, but Sulu is a perfectionist, and more than that, he cares, deeply. People might have died because of something he did wrong, and he wants to know what it was, so he can make sure he never does it again. He knows this is the kind of guilt that keeps Kirk up at night sometimes, the reason sometimes he'll stop seeing Sulu completely and start looking past him at someone who isn't there, and he knows there's no point to it, but it's not like he has anything better to do. It's been a week, and the hospital staff have given up telling him to go home. None of Kirk's crew, his friends, pay any attention to when visiting hours are supposed to be, and they've all picked up his bad habit of refusing to take no for an answer. It's easier to just let them linger in the halls like so many anxious ghosts than to try and get them to leave. None of them want to miss it when he finally wakes up. 

 

It's been a week.

 

\---

 

Two weeks after his death, Jim Kirk wakes up in a bright room, with Bones standing next to him, and someone else's blood in his veins. At first, he's, well, he's kind of confused, and really disoriented, and he's got a killer headache, but he plays it all off. He sees Bones first, of course. He wonders when the last time he left the room was - from the looks of it, he's on at least his third day without sleep, and Jim suspects any he has gotten either came out of a sealed packet with someone else's prescription written on it, or sprawled on the ground between the hospital bed and the window. The sun is high in the sky and almost uncomfortably bright, and his hospital gown itches, and that headache really isn't going away, and Bones is being ornery, of course, and Kirk smiles. 

 

"What the hell are you looking so damned happy about?" Bones demands, stopping mid-medical lecture.

 

Kirk is getting his bearings, working on remembering how to stand, and he just grins again. "It feels good to be alive," he says, and even Bones can't argue with that. 

 

He sees Spock next, Spock, who saved his life when they both thought there wasn't a life left to save. Spock, who wouldn't save his own life if it meant breaking a few rules, but broke everything to get to Khan, who would have broken him into tiny pieces if it meant making up for some fraction of the damage he'd done (it wouldn't, of course, but it would have felt good - Jim understands that one perfectly). He remembers dying by his side, remembers the look on Spock's face. And to think - he'd once thought that he didn't feel at all. 

 

His legs are still shaky, something about his muscles being ever so slightly atrophied, or something equally dramatic sounding, he wasn't really paying attention, so Kirk can't walk out of the hospital just yet, for all he wants to. He hates feeling weak, like he does now, but he thinks he hates being dead more, so he tries to think of it as a different kind of flying, like being a fledgling, getting his wings back. It would be easy to feel like a god now, how Khan did, to feel like he isn't bound by the same rules as everyone else, but he only feels more human. It's humbling, but it's good. Everything feels good, like that old, old song his mother loved: oh don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. Second chances are the best thing you'll ever get.

 

\---

 

Sulu doesn't come in until after Bones leaves, finally, to get some sleep in an actual bed ("and that's an order, Bones, don't let me see you back here until you've been out for at least eight hours"). Jim's asleep when he does come in, actually asleep, not gone like he was before: Sulu can tell the difference at a glance. It's something in his expression - he always smiles when he's dreaming. All the time Sulu had been watching him, he hadn't been smiling, hadn't been dreaming. It was almost like he really had died, like they had just kept his body breathing with nothing really alive inside, muted and hollow, and completely un-Kirk-like. It was unnerving, to say the least, and however much Sulu wants him to just wake up already, this is okay. This is what his captain looks like when he's sleeping, and there's something beautiful about it: watching Jim Kirk sleep is like watching a tiger sleep, or a knowing that a tornado and a breeze are cousins, or that spring follows winter, that everything is possible if you don't believe there's an alternative. 

 

As it happens, he's only out for an hour or two, but Sulu stays the whole time. It would be wrong to leave him without someone in the room, anyway, and with Bones gone, Sulu is glad to fill the role.

 

\---

 

The sky outside his window is dark, and the monitor reads past midnight when Kirk opens his eyes for the second time since dying. He's not sure the novelty of that will ever wear off, really, and he blinks a few times for good measure, which is when he sees Sulu, in a chair in the corner, reading something on a small tablet screen, blending into the surroundings like a moth on the bark of a tree. He has a way of doing that, of vacillating between being so subtle it takes effort to pick him and what he really means out of the haze, and being well, completely the opposite. The thing about Sulu is it's easy to take him for granted, but for those who don't, it's inconceivable that anyone would. Kirk has never been happier to see him in that moment. 

 

"I hope I didn't make you wait there too long. Can't imagine the chairs in this place are all that comfortable to sit in."

 

Sulu smiles, and moves to return to Kirk's side. "Not especially, no," he says. "Though it sure beats sleeping in them. I'm not sure that I'll ever get the crick out of my neck."

 

"Jesus," Jim says, "did all of you just camp out here the entire time I was out?"

 

"Not the entire time," Sulu replies. "I went home for dinner once, I think." 

 

They both laugh at that, and at the simple fact that they can; it feels damned good to be alive. 

 

"You saved the ship," Sulu says, after a while. 

 

"Yeah, well." Kirk breaks eye contact finally, looks out the window, and sits up a little more. "I lost about half of it first."

 

Sulu doesn't say anything, just leans over, the hospital sheets whispering against the sleeve of his uniform, moves his hand to Jim's cheek, drawing him in slightly, and presses his lips against Jim's, soft with a harshness just beneath the surface, and Jim lets it all go: his wins and his losses, victories and defeats, none of it matters just then. Sulu kisses like something new every time, and this kiss tastes like flying, like sunrise, and stars, and waking up. Jim leans into him, doesn't think, just kisses back, just gathers the fabric of Sulu's uniform in his fingers and pulls him closer, a hand on his side, just above his hip. They don't kiss for that long really, but it feels like making up for lost time, and it ends with their smiles touching at the edges. Falling isn't so bad if you know how to miss the ground. 

 

It feels damned good to be alive.


End file.
